Apple iPhone 5 Release

Everything You Need To Know About The New iPhone 5

Yesterday Apple launched its iPhone 5 to a crowd of not-quite-unsuspecting journalists and internet lovers and haters. The release packed few surprises but predictably fleshed out the previously unknown parts. Yes, it’s called iPhone 5 and it is made entirely of glass and aluminum. Yes, it’s 7.6mm thick, 18% thinner than before. Yes, it's the world's thinnest smartphone, said Phil Schiller. It weighs 112 grams, which is 20% lighter than the iPhone 4S. It still has a retina display and matches the 326 pixels-per-inch 4” screen with 1136 x 640 resolution. And they have new headphones — dubbed EarPods — that apparently no longer suck.

The iPhone 5‘s touch features are now integrated into the display so it’s thinner and sharper while getting less glare. Apple said that the screen gets 44% better colour saturation and has the full sRGB colour gamut, similar to the iPad 3’s screen. They also said that apps need to be optimized for the new widescreen format and theirs are already updated.

For connectivity, Apple is indeed not out of their minds, so the iPhone 5 will ship with 4G LTE which maxes out at 100 Mb/s. Whilst 4G won't start to be rolled out until the end of this year at the earliest, if you aren’t on a 4G network or roam between 4G and 3G, the iPhone 5 sports a dynamic antenna that can automatically switch the connections.

Another surprise not in the rumour mill and leaked pics was the new iPhone 5 CPU/GPU chip: the A6. According to Apple, it’s twice as fast for CPU operations and twice as fast for 3D graphics compared to the A5. Since it’s 22% smaller than the A5, it’s more energy efficient. Combined with the bigger battery of the iPhone 5, makes means that battery life is actually better than the iPhone 4S, which already gets extremely good battery life. In real-world specs, that turns into eight hours of 3G talk time and 3G browsing, eight hours of LTE browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi, 10 hours video playback, 40 hours music playback and 225 hours of standby. Apple’s pretty conservative with their battery life estimations so those values are probably not a pipe dream.

As far as the “twice as good” value for CPU and GPU stuff, they did lend a pretty credible display to that. EA showed the game Real Racing 3, that looked phenomenal and could have been a Forza screenshot from an Xbox 360. As a 3D graphics junkie, it was clearly doing something new. This is likely going to be the GPU to beat in benchmarks for a while to come.

Next is the camera. It’s a newer 8MP 3264x2448 sensor, sports a sapphire crystal (don’t ask because we don’t know), backside illumination, hybrid ID filter, and f/2.4 aperture five-element lens. On the software side it features a dynamic low-light mode and 40% faster image capture. But the most interesting addition was the new panorama photo shooting mode. In usual panorama shooting, you take a number of shots and stitch them together - the iPhone 5 lets you just hit a button and pan the camera and it assembles a single 28-megapixel panorama image. It’s dead easy and newb-friendly. Still, it will be interesting to see how the camera fares vs. the Nokia Lumia 920, which is the latest king of low-light photography.

On the video shooting end, the front-facing camera is now 720p and the 1080p back-facing camera gets facial recognition for video.

Other little bits that were surprising: the new iHorn sports three mics for voice recognition and noise cancellation; the new connector is dubbed "Lightning" and is reversible, and Apple does have an adapter for connecting to old docks' style connectors to the new connector.

So what’s it going to cost? The same as the iPhone 4S: around$199 for the 16GB, $299 for the 32GB and $399 for the 64GB model. The 4S is now $99 and iPhone 4 is now free on contract. Pre-orders start on Friday the 14th and they start shipping on September 21st in the U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

iOS 6 will be rolled out on September 19th and available for free for the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, 3GS, new iPad, iPad 2 and iPod Touch.

But Apple didn’t stop at the iPhone and iOS. It also announced a new multi-touch iPod nano and iPod touch. The nano’s got a wide color screen and FM tuner with recording functions, a pedometer built right in and Bluetooth audio streaming. The new iPod Touch is basically an iPhone 5 screen with slimmer profile: better camera, 4” retina display, face recognition for video capture, better battery life, and Touch users will now get Siri integration. But it uses the older A5 chip, so it won’t be the beefy mobile gaming device that the iPhone 5 will be.

Apple’s clearly hoping to give the Lightning connector a third-party device boost by launching this at the same time as the iPhone 5. Fracturing a huge market is risky at any time, but with Android shipping more devices, will this be enough to keep Apple dominant in the world of docks, car adapters and mobile music? We’ll have to wait and see.